In the decade 1820-30, more than 100 anti-slavery societies were established in slave States (seeJames G. Birney and His Times, an admirable exposition of the conservative anti-slavery movement). The Manumission Society of North Carolina in 1825 took a kind of census of the State, and concluded that of its people 60 in 100 favored emancipation in some form. In the same year a pamphlet published in Charleston, S. C., on "The Critical Situation and Future Prospects of the Slave-Holding States," bitterly declared that the whole book and newspaper press of the North and East teemed with articles on slavery. In Maryland, an anti-slavery party in 1826 elected two members to the House of Delegates; but this movement disappeared on the election of Jackson two years later. In Alabama, Birney, a man of a fine type, and growing toward leadership, secured in 1827 the passage of a law forbidding the importation of slaves as merchandise; but this was repealed two years later. So the wave flowed and ebbed, but on the whole it seemed to advance.
Among local societies in the Northern States, one may be instanced in New Haven, Ct., in which, in 1825, five young men associated themselves; among them were Edward Beecher, Leonard Bacon, and Theodore D. Woolsey. They were highly practical; their immediate aims were: First to elevate the black population of New Haven; secondly, to influence public sentiment in the city and State;and thirdly, to influence the theological students in Yale college. So faithful were their labors in their own city for its black population—described as in most wretched condition, which seems to have been the case with most of the blacks at the North in this period—that six years later Garrison pronounced them more comfortable and less injured by prejudice than in any other place in the Union. The young men of the New Haven and Andover seminaries united in a project of a college for the blacks; strong support was obtained; but the fierce wave of reaction following Nat Turner's revolt swept it away. Lane seminary at Cincinnati, a Presbyterian stronghold, became a center of enthusiastic anti-slavery effort, with the brilliant young Theodore D. Weld as its foremost apostle; he was welcomed and heard in the border slave States. The authorities of the college, alarmed by the audacity of their pupils, tried to restrain the movement, and the result was a great secession of students.
The seceders proposed to form a theological department at Oberlin College (established two years before) if they could have Charles G. Finney, the famous revivalist, as their teacher. But Finney declined to take the place until the conservative trustees consented to admit colored youths to the College; and thus Oberlin became an anti-slavery stronghold.
As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. John Wesleys words were a keynote: "Instantly, at any price, were it the half of your goods, deliver thyself from blood-guiltiness!" A Virginia minister, Rev. George Bourne, published in 1816Slavery and the Book Irreconcilable, in which he said: "The system is so entirely corrupt that it admits of no cure but by a total and immediate abolition." Two other Southern ministers, James Duncan and John Rankin, wrote to the same effect. In England, the abolition of slavery in the West India colonies was being persistently urged; the impulse was a part of the philanthropic movement that went along with the evangelical revival, and Wilberforce was its leader. These English abolitionists were coming to "immediatism" from 1824, and their influence told in America.
Among the most unselfish and devoted laborers for the slave was Benjamin Lundy. He was a Quaker by birth and training; he overtaxed his strength and permanently impaired his hearing by prematurely trying to do a man's work on his father's farm in New Jersey, and settled at the saddler's trade in Wheeling, Va., in 1808. With the outlawing of the African slave trade, there was beginning the sale of slaves from Virginia to the Southern cotton-fields, and the sight of the sorrowful exiles moved Lundy's heart to a lifelong devotion of himself to pleading the cause of the slave. Infirm, deaf, unimpressive in speech and bearing, trudging on long journeys, and accepting a decent poverty, he gave all the resources of a strong and sweet nature to the service of the friendless and unhappy. He supported himself by his trade, while he lectured and wrote. He established in 1821 a weeklyGenius of Universal Emancipation, at Mt. Pleasant, O., starting without a dollar of capital and only six subscribers; and at first walking twenty miles every week to the printing press, and returning with his edition on his back. Four years later he moved his paper to Baltimore. Anti-slavery agitation was still tolerated in the border States, though once Lundy was attacked by a bully who almost murdered him. Whenthe impending election of Jackson in 1828 came as a chill to the anti-slavery cause, the waning fortunes of his paper sent Lundy to Boston to seek aid. There he found sympathy in a number of the clergy, though fear of arousing the hostility of the South kept them cautious. Dr. Channing wrote to Daniel Webster, expressing the fullest sympathy with Lundy's devotion to freedom, but also the gravest apprehension that unless the slaveholders were approached in a spirit of friendliness rather than denunciation, there would result a sectional strife fraught with the greatest danger. We should say to the South, wrote Channing, "Slavery is your calamity and not your crime"; and the whole nation should assume the burden of emancipation, meeting the expense by the revenue from the sale of public lands. In this brief letter of Channing's there is more of true statesmanship than in all the utterances of the politicians of his day.
But Lundy (himself not given to denunciation) made one convert of a very different temper from Channing's or his own—William Lloyd Garrison, a young man educated in a printing-office, fearless, enthusiastic, and energetic in the highest degree. Quickly won to the emancipation idea, and passing soon to full belief in immediate and uncompensated liberation, he allied himself with Lundy as the active editor of theGenius, while the older man devoted himself to traveling and lecturing. TheGeniusat once became militant and aggressive. The incidents which constantly fell under Garrison's eye—slave auctions and whippings—fanned the fire within him. One day, for example, a slave came into the office, told his story, and showed the proofs. His master had lately died, leaving him his freedom, which was to be legally effected in a few weeks; but in the meantime the overseer under whom he worked, displeased at his way of loading a wagon, flogged him witha cowhide so severely that his back showed twenty-seven terrible gashes. Garrison appealed to the master's heirs for redress, but was repelled with contumely. Presently he assailed an old fellow-townsman in Newburyport, Mass., because a ship he owned had been employed to transport a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans. The denunciation was unmeasured; the ship-owner brought suit, and as some points in the article were not sustained by the evidence, Garrison was fined $100. Unable to pay he went to jail, bearing his captivity with courage and high cheer, till Arthur Tappan, a New York merchant and a leader in the anti-slavery cause, paid his fine and released him. TheGeniusbeing ruined, Garrison transferred his field of labor to Boston, where, at the beginning of 1831, he started the weeklyLiberator. He and his partner, Isaac Knapp, did all the work of every kind, living principally on bread and water, and with only six hours a week, and those at midnight, for Garrison to write his articles. The paper's motto was: "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind." In his salutatory Garrison wrote: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen,—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retract a single inch—and I will be heard!"
While Garrison's language was constantly such as to arouse passion to the boiling point, he was always in theory a supporter of peace, opposed to war under any conditions, and even to resistance of force by force. But in 1829 thereappeared a pamphlet of a different tenor; anAppeal, by Walker, a Boston negro, addressed directly to the slaves. It was a fiery recital of their wrongs and an incitement to forcible redress. Its appearance in the South caused great excitement. The Governors of Virginia and Georgia sent special messages to their Legislatures about it. Garrison wrote of it, in theGenius: "It breathes the most impassioned and determined spirit. We deprecate its publication, though we cannot but wonder at the bravery and intelligence of its author." Garrison's biographers—his sons—speak of Walker as "a sort of John the Baptist to the new anti-slavery dispensation." It was well for the Baptist that his head was out of Herod's reach. The Georgia Legislature passed in a single day a bill forbidding the entry of free negroes into the State, and making "the circulation of pamphlets of evil tendency among our domestics" a capital offense.
Large as these events loom in the retrospect, they were comparatively little noticed in their time. Virginia held in 1830 a convention for the revision of her constitution; among its members were Madison, Monroe, and Randolph; and emancipation was not even mentioned. Jefferson was dead, and the spirit of Jefferson seemed dead. Then the unexpected happened. There was a negro preacher, a slave named Nat Turner. He was a man of slight figure, reputed among his people a sort of prophet, addicted to visions and rhapsodies. He planned in 1831 an uprising of the slaves. He circulated among them a document written in blood, with cabalistic figures, and pictures of the sun and a crucifix. One night he and a group of companions set out on their revolt. Others joined them voluntarily or by impressment till they numbered forty. They began by killing Turner's master and his family; then they killed a lady and her ten children; they attacked a girls' boarding-school and killed all the inmates. Houses stood open and unguarded, and most of the white men were away at a camp-meeting. From Sunday night till Monday noon the band went on its way unchecked, and killed sixty persons. Then the neighborhood rallied and overcame them; slew several on the spot; but held the rest for trial, which was held regularly and fairly, and thirteen were executed. The origin of the outbreak remained mysterious. Turner said on his trial that he had not been unkindly treated, and there was no evidence of provocation by special abuse. There was no trace of any instigation from the North in any form. It seemed not a stroke for freedom by men worthy to be free; not even a desperate revolt against intolerable wrong; but more like an outbreak of savagery, the uprising of the brute in man, thirsty for blood. The fear at first prevailed that there existed a widespread conspiracy, and various legislation for protection and repression was enacted or discussed.
But the larger mind of Virginia was moved toward a radical treatment of the disease itself, instead of its symptoms. In the next session of the Legislature, 1831-2, proposals for a general emancipation were brought forward, and the whole subject was canvassed in a long and earnest debate. For slavery on its merits hardly a word of defense was spoken. The moral condemnation was not frequent or strong, but the economic mischief was conceded by almost all. It was recognized that labor was debased; manufactures and immigration were discouraged; the yeomanry were leaving the State. One bold speaker declared that the masters were not entitled to compensation, since property condemned by the State as a nuisance brings no award of damages to the owner. But the general agreement was that emancipation should be compensated and gradual, and that the blacks must be removed from the State. One plan wasthat they should be deported in a body to Africa; another, that the increase—about 6000 a year—should be so deported; while Thomas Jefferson Randolph urged a plan which recalled that framed by his uncle, Thomas Jefferson, half a century before. He proposed that the owner should maintain the slave-child till the age of eighteen or twenty-one, his labor for the last six or eight years being regarded as compensation for the expense of infancy; and that the slave should then be hired out till he had earned his passage to Africa. But, whatever the method, let decisive action be taken, and taken now! The Legislature, it is said, was largely made up of young and inexperienced men. Would not the courage and hopefulness of Virginia youth essay this great deliverance? Older voices bade them to the task. Said the RichmondEnquirer(edited by the elder Ritchie), January 7, 1832: "Means, sure but gradual, systematic but discreet, ought to be adopted for reducing the mass of evil which is pressing upon the South, and will still more press upon her the longer it is put off. We say, now, in the utmost sincerity of our hearts, that our wisest men cannot give too much of their attention to this subject, nor can they give it too soon." It was one of the decisive hours of history:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
But the task was too great, or the life-long habit of the slave-owner had been too enervating. The apparent expense, the collision of different plans, the difficulty in revolutionizing the whole industrial system, the hold of an aristocracy affording to its upper class a fascinating leisure and luxury—these, and the absence of any high moral inspiration in the movement, brought it to naught. Instead of decreeing emancipation, the Legislature fell back onthe policy of stricter repression. It enacted that the advocacy of rebellion by writing or printing should be a penitentiary offense, and to express the opinion that masters had no rights to their slaves was made punishable by a fine of $500 and one year in jail. To advise conspiracy was treason and its punishment death. It had been enacted a year before that no white man be allowed to assemble slaves to instruct them in reading and writing; and to this it was now added that neither slaves nor free negroes be allowed to preach.
And so Virginia abdicated her old-time leadership in the cause of human rights, and the primacy of the South passed to South Carolina and to Calhoun, the champion of slavery.
In the meantime the organization of the radical anti-slavery force went on at the North. In 1832 Garrison, Oliver Johnson and ten others constituted themselves the New England Anti-slavery Society. Almost its first attack was directed against the Colonization Society, Garrison being always as fierce against half-way friends as against pronounced foes. In 1833 a little group of more moderate but resolute men organized a local association in New York city, and under their call the American Anti-slavery Society held its first meeting in Philadelphia, in December. Among the New York leaders were Arthur and Lewis Tappan, merchants of high standing and men of well-balanced and admirable character; with them were associated Joshua Leavitt and Elizur Wright. Among the Massachusetts recruits was Whittier. The sixty-four members were largely made up of merchants, preachers, and theological students. Almost all were church members; twenty-one Presbyterians or Congregationalists, nineteen Quakers, and one Unitarian,—Samuel J. May. There was a noticeable absence of men versed in public affairs. The constitution was carefullydrawn to safeguard the society against the imputation of unconstitutional or anarchic tendencies. It declared that the right to legislate for the abolition of slavery existed only in the Legislature of each State; that the society would appeal to Congress to prohibit the interstate slave trade, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories, and to admit no more slave States; and that the society would not countenance the insurrection of slaves. Garrison, who had been visiting the Abolitionists in England, was not among the signers of the call to the convention, and the constitution was hardly in the line of his views; but he wrote a declaration of principles which after some debate was adopted. It was impassioned and unsparing; pictured the woes of the slaves and the essential wickedness of the system; denounced compensation and colonization; declared that "all laws admitting the right of slavery are before God utterly null and void" and "ought instantly to be abrogated"; and called for a universal and unresting agitation.
Thus, with the beginning of the second third of the nineteenth century, the issue as to American slavery was distinctly drawn, and the leading parties to it had taken their positions. Let us try to understand the motive and spirit of each.
In the new phase of affairs, the chief feature was the changed attitude of the South. In the sentiment of its leading and representative men, there had been three stages: first, "slavery is an evil, and we will soon get rid of it"; next, "slavery is an evil, but we do not know how to get rid of it"; now it became "slavery is good and right, and we will maintain it." To this ground the South came with surprising suddenness in the years immediately following 1833. What caused the change? The favorite Southern explanation has been that the violence of the Abolitionists exasperated the South, checked its drift toward emancipation, and provoked it in self-defense to justify and extend its system. This may be effective as a criticism of the extreme Abolitionists, but as regards the South it is rather a confession than a defense. On a subject involving its whole prosperity, its essential character, its relation to the world's civilization, did it reverse its course at the bitter words of a few critics? If that were true, it would bespeak passionate irritability, an incapacity for the healthy give-and-take of practical life, in keeping with the worst that could be said of the effect of slavery on the master. In truth the violence of Garrison and his few followers wasbut a minor element in the case. Slavery had become immensely profitable; it was the corner-stone of a social fabric in which the upper class had an extremely comfortable place; it was involved with the whole social and political life of the section. It was too important to be dealt with half-heartedly: it must be accepted, justified, believed in,—or it must be abandoned. John Randolph of Roanoke had said of slavery: "We are holding a wolf by the ears; it is perilous alike to hold on or to let go." But one or the other must be done, and the South elected to keep on holding the wolf.
The better to understand the developments of the following years, it will be well to consider a group of representative men,—Calhoun, Garrison, Birney, Channing, and Webster.
Calhoun had many of the elements of high statesmanship—clear views, strong convictions, forcible speech. He was ambitious, but in no ignoble fashion; he often served his country well, as in his efficient administration of the war department under Munroe, his protest against the spoils system and the personal government of Jackson, and his influence in averting war with England over the Oregon boundary in 1845-46. After the Presidency was clearly out of his reach—from 1832—he was growingly identified with and devoted to the interests of his own section, yet always with a patriotic regard for the Union as a whole. He had that fondness for theories and abstractions which was characteristic of the Southern statesmen, fostered perhaps by the isolated life of the plantation. With this went a kind of provincialism of thought, bred from the wide difference which slavery made from the life of the world at large. When Calhoun, in one of his Senate orations was magnifying the advantage of slave over free labor, Wade of Ohio, who sat listening intently, turned to a neighbor andexclaimed: "That man lives off of all traveled roads!" He had neither the arts nor the magnetism of the popular politician; he won no such personal following as Clay and Jackson; but the South more and more accepted him as the most logical and far-seeing champion of its peculiar interests.
His personality had much in common with Jonathan Edwards. There was in both the same inflexible logic and devotion to ideas, the same personal purity and austerity. The place of the mystic's fire which burned in Edwards was taken in Calhoun by a passionate devotion to the commonwealth. In both there was a certain moral callousness which made the one view with complacence a universe including a perpetual hell of unspeakable torments; while the other accepted as the ideal society a system in which the lowest class was permanently debased. Each was the champion of a cause destined to defeat because condemned by the moral sentiment of the world,—Edwards the advocate of Calvinism, and Calhoun of slavery.
Calhoun is to be regarded as a typical slave-holder of the better class. He owned and cultivated a plantation with several hundred slaves; spent much time upon it; made it profitable, and dispensed a generous hospitality. Such a plantation was a little community, organized and administered with no small labor and skill; with house servants, often holding a friendly and intimate relation with the family; with a few trained mechanics and a multitude of field hands. As to physical comfort the slaves were probably as well or better provided than the bulk of European peasantry,—this on the testimony of witnesses as unfriendly to slavery as Fanny Kemble and Dr. Channing. Order and some degree of morality were enforced, and religion, largely of the emotional type, prevailed widely. So much may be said, perhaps, for the average plantation, certainlyfor the better class, and a very large class. Joseph Le Conte, the eminent scientist, a writer of the highest credit, in his pleasing autobiography describes his boyhood on a Georgia plantation, and characterizes his father as a man of rare excellence to whom he owed the best of his mental inheritance. He writes of him: "The best qualities of character were constantly exercised in the just, wise, and kindly management of his 200 slaves. The negroes were strongly attached to him, and proud of calling him master.... There never was a more orderly, nor apparently a happier working class than the negroes of Liberty county as I knew them in my boyhood."
Against this description are to be set such statements as this made by Frederick Law Olmsted, after many months of travel in the South: "The field hand negro is on an average a very poor and a very bad creature, much worse than I had supposed before I had seen him and grown familiar with his stupidity, indolence, duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous circumstance to a civilized people." Olmsted saw no resource but gradual emancipation with suitable training. A resident of this same Liberty county, Rev. C. C. Jones, himself a staunch supporter of slavery, but urgent for giving better religious instruction to the slaves, wrote in 1842; "That the negroes are in a degraded state is a fact, so far as my knowledge extends, universally conceded.... Negro marriages are neither recognized nor protected by law. Uncleanness—this sin may be considered as universal.... They are proverbial thieves." But how could "religious instruction" produce chastity in those for whom the law did not recognize marriage, or honesty in those who themselves were stolen?
But the bright side of the medal, which had so dark an obverse, was the interpretation on which Calhoun and the slave-holding class took their stand. They resolutely ignored the frequent abuses and the essential degradation of manhood. They fashioned the theory—it was the old familiar theory of past ages, but had fallen out of sight in the enthusiasm of the revolutionary period—that society rightly and properly is constituted with a servile class as its base. Calhoun declared: "I hold that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." And generally, he adds, the condition of the laborer has been worse than it now is in the South. In advance of civilization, he declares, there always comes a conflict between capital and labor; and this conflict the South avoids by unflinchingly holding the laborer in his subject condition.
Calhoun is dead, and slavery is dead, but the ideas he then avowed are still powerfully, if more latently, asserting themselves in our social order.
For these theories the slave-holders now found justification from the ministers of religion. The South held more tenaciously than any other section to the old-fashioned type of Christianity. In earlier days, religious teachers—as in the unanimous vote of the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818—had held slavery to be "utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But now the Southern ministers of all denominations appealed for ample justification to slavery as it was permitted under the Jewish law, and as it existed in the time of Christ and the Apostles, and was unrebuked by them. They went further back, and in the curse pronounced by Noah upon the unfilial Ham and his posterity, they found warrant for holding the African in perpetual bondage. Sothe South closed up its ranks, in Church and State, and answered its critics with self-justification, and with counterattack on what it declared to be their unconstitutional, anarchic, and infidel teachings.
The agitation against slavery took on a new phase with the appearance of Garrison and his founding of theLiberatorand the New England Anti-slavery Society in 1831. Garrison was filled and possessed with one idea—the wrongs of the slave, and the instant, pressing, universal duty of giving him freedom. It was in him an unselfish and heroic passion. For it he cheerfully accepted hardship, obloquy, peril. He saw no difficulties except in the sin of wrongdoers and their allies; the only course he admitted was immediate emancipation by the master of his human property, and the instant coöperation and urgency of all others to this end. His words were charged with passion; they kindled sympathetic souls with their own flame; they roused to a like heat those whom they assailed; and they sent thrills of alarm, wonder, and wrath, through the community. Wherever theLiberatorwent, or the lecturers of the new anti-slavery societies were heard, there could be no indifference or forgetfulness as to slavery. Hitherto, to the immense mass of people throughout the North, it had been a far-away and unimportant matter. Now it was sent home to the business and bosoms of all men.
The anti-slavery movement changed its character. Garrison entered on a very active campaign, lecturing and establishing local societies. Prominent among his assistants was George Thompson, one of the English Abolitionists, who, after the emancipation of the West India slaves by the British government at a cost of £20,000,000, came to this country and acted as Garrison's ally, winning some converts by his eloquence, but heightening the unpopularity of the movement through the general hostility to foreigninterference. The early societies had been largely in the border States, and their efforts had an immediate object in the political action of their own communities. Now, the resentment and fear of the slave-holding interest soon drove them out of those communities. They spread faster than ever,—in a few years it was said that they were 1300,—but were confined to the free States. What immediate and practical aim could they pursue? It was the question of practical action that brought Garrison's views to a sharp test, and soon divided him from the great body of anti-slavery people.
In Garrison's mind there was room for only one idea at a time. Slavery was a crime, a sin, an abomination,—that to him was the first, the last, the whole truth of the matter. He had little education, and he had not in the least a judicial or an open mind. It was to him clear and certain that the blacks were in every way the equal of the whites. Of the complexity of human society; of the vital necessity of a political bond uniting communities, and of the inevitable imperfections and compromises which are the price of an established social order; of the process of evolution by which humanity slowly grows from one stage into another; of the fact that the negro was in some ways better as a slave in America than as a savage in Africa, and that there must be other intermediate stages in his development; of the consideration due to honest differences of opinion and to deeply-rooted habits—of all this Garrison was as ignorant as a six-years-old child. When facts came in his way, he denied them; when institutions stood across his path, he denounced them; when men differed from him, he assailed them.
As to a practical course of action by Northern people, he was absolutely without resource. How were they to free the slaves? Not by force—force was to Garrison as wickedas slavery itself. By their votes? That was only possible under the government as ordained by the Constitution; and the Constitution allowed no action against slavery except by each State for itself. The worse then for the Constitution! Ere many years Garrison declared, and put as a standing heading to theLiberator: "The United States Constitution Is a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell." He went further; for a time at least he held that all human governments, as resting on force, were sinful, and to be ignored, or passively submitted to, without taking active part. He declared the Union, as a compact with slave-holders, was worthy only to be dissolved. But how even dissolve it, since he counselled his followers not to vote? And if it were dissolved, how would the slaves be any nearer freedom? Was there any possible good outcome to non-voting and dissolution of the Union, except that there would then be no complicity with slave-holders? And would such escape from complicity be any help to the slave, any service to humanity, anything more than an egotistic separation from political society, a mere refined selfishness?
Such questions never troubled Garrison. Instead of answering them, he found something else to denounce. The churches he thought were derelict, in that they did not bear testimony against slavery. True, most of the great religious bodies of the country were soon rent asunder on the question: Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, were divided between North and South, because neither side could tolerate the other's position on slavery. But nothing satisfied Mr. Garrison. To him the churches were "cages of unclean birds and synagogues of Satan."
But if the gun was ill-aimed, at least the recoil was prodigious. It is unreasonable to attribute principally to the violence of theLiberatorthe new and determined rally ofthe South in defense of slavery,—Calhoun and his followers had far wider grounds for their action than that,—but undoubtedly that violence helped to consolidate and intensify the Southern resistance. The Abolitionist papers were at first sent all over the South. The Southerners saw little difference between such papers as theLiberatorand such direct incitements to insurrection as Walker'sAppeal; and the horrors of Nat Turner's rising were fresh in mind. They put all Abolitionist teaching under a common ban. At the North, the anti-slavery cause became associated in the popular mind with hostility to the government, to the churches, to the established usages of society. It was Charles Sumner who said: "An omnibus load of Boston Abolitionists had done more harm to the anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."
Garrison's own following was soon divided, and a large part drew away from him. The most important division came on the question of political action, when, in the Presidential election of 1840, the practical wing entered into the political field, as the inevitable and only arena for effective action; nominated a candidate, and laid the foundation for the election of Lincoln twenty years later. In the American Anti-slavery Society there came a contest; Garrison triumphed by a narrow vote, but a secession followed. Of his immediate and permanent allies the most important was Wendell Phillips. He threw himself heart and soul into the cause; he gave to it an educated and brilliant mind, and a fascinating oratory; he was as uncompromising and censorious as Garrison.
Garrison always held a place of honor and friendship among the Abolitionists, even those who refused to follow his leadership. In private life his genial and winning traits were as marked as was his fierceness on the platform. The term "Abolitionist" is somewhat indefinite, but it may bestbe defined as denoting a person to whom the supreme interest in public affairs was the extinction of slavery. It included not only those who shared Garrison's ideas of non-voting and peaceable disunion, but those, too, like Birney and Whittier, who respected the Constitution and worked for their cause through a political party. The term also applied to the few who, like John Brown, would attack slavery by force of arms. On the other hand, the name Abolitionist did not properly belong to those who were opposed to slavery, but held that opposition along with other political tenets and not as a supreme article of faith. These were best included under the general term of "anti-slavery men," a designation accepted by many of the Free Soil, Whig and Democratic parties, and later by the Republican party. The classification cannot be made exact, but the word "Abolitionists" generally designated the men and women to whom the extinction of slavery was a primary interest, and who gave to it their habitual and earnest attention, through the anti-slavery societies and otherwise. In this broader sense, the Abolitionists were a notable company. They were bound together by a disinterested and noble sentiment, and by sacrifices to the cause. The hostility aroused by Garrison, Phillips, Pilsbury, and a few like-minded associates, extended to many who went to no such extremes. The anti-slavery speakers were sometimes mobbed: once in Boston a rope was round Garrison's neck and his life was in peril; meetings were broken up; and the respectable part of the community sometimes encouraged or tolerated these assaults. Actual physical injury was very rare, but a hostile social atmosphere was the frequent price of fidelity to conscience.
Among the most notable of the leaders was Gerritt Smith. He took active part in politics, and was for a time in Congress. He is finely characterized by Andrew D. White:
"Of all tribunes of the people I have ever known he dwells in my memory as possessing the greatest variety of gifts. He had the prestige given by great wealth, by lavish generosity, by transparent honesty, by earnestness of purpose, by advocacy of every good cause, by a superb presence, and by natural eloquence of a very high order. He was very tall and large, with a noble head, an earnest yet kindly face, and of all human voices I have ever heard his was the most remarkable for its richness, depth, and strength."
Women took a prominent and honorable part; the venerable and beautiful Lucretia Mott gave her benign presence to the gatherings; Lydia Maria Child made heavy sacrifices in the good cause. In the common ardor, and with a Quaker precedent, women took part as speakers. Women's rights was closely united with anti-slavery; and hence came a fresh odium from conservative quarters, while the admirable bearing of the leading women won growing favor for both lines of emancipation. The makers of the new American literature were friends of the anti-slavery cause. Emerson gave to it his words of serene inspiration. Whittier was among its ardent apostles, shared in its political activity, and sang lyrics of freedom. Bryant was its strong advocate in journalism. Lowell, drawn by his noble wife, came as a strong ally, and the Biglow Papers gave what had been greatly lacking,—the salt of humor.
The Abolitionists might be compared to a comet,—a body with a bright head and a nebulous tail. Like all radicals and reformers they had a fringe of unbalanced and crotchety folk. It must be said, too, that absorption in a topic remote from the concerns of one's daily life is apt to be somewhat distracting and demoralizing. Dr. Joseph Henry Allen—an admirable and too little known writer—has in an eloquent and beautiful passage described the Abolitionists (though he was not one of them) as the devotees of a genuine andheroic religion. But any adequate religion must find its main application in the duties and services of the immediate present; and the men and women who were possessed day and night by the wrongs of those to whom they could render little service, were apt to be thrown out of touch with near and homely relations, and become what are now called "cranks."
But to appreciate the service of the Abolitionists we must remember that up to the birth of the Republican party in 1854 almost all of the political leaders and men of public affairs, as well as most of the churches, colleges, and professional educators, held aloof from the anti-slavery cause. With a few exceptions, they left the work of educating public sentiment, and shaping some policy on the supreme question, to be done by this little company,—of lecturers, ministers, literary men and women. These did loyally and bravely according to their lights; and they had their reward, outwardly in unpopularity and sometimes persecution, but inwardly in a social atmosphere within their own body, warm, joyful, and religious; and the sense of alliance with the Divine Force in the universe. Said Wendell Phillips: "One man with God is a majority."
Of the moderate wing of the anti-slavery men, a good representative was James G. Birney. With the fine physical presence and genial manhood of the typical Kentuckian, he had a well-balanced mind and a thorough loyalty to the sense of duty, which broadened as he grew. Removing to Alabama, he became anti-slavery in his sentiments, and he was a friend not only of the negro, but of all who were oppressed. As the legal representative of the Cherokee nation he stood for years between the Indians and those who would wrong them. He identified himself for a time with the colonization cause; and, finding himself growing powerless in Southern communities, he removed to Ohio, where there was a strong and vigorous anti-slavery propaganda. One incident of his life in Cincinnati illustrates the concrete form which slavery sometimes took. A Missourian owned a slave girl who was his own daughter, a cultivated and refined woman. He took her to the East for a visit, treated her habitually as one of his own family, but refused her prayers for freedom. Dreading the possibilities of her lot, she made her escape in Cincinnati; and, concealing her identity and history, she got a situation as a servant in Mr. Birney's family. One day when he was absent from the city she came home in terror; she had been recognized on the street by two professional slave-catchers; now she told her story and implored protection. In vain,—the officers of the law dragged her from the house; a judge gave speedy sentence that she was a slave; she wastaken sobbing to jail; and the next day she was carried down the river to New Orleans, where she was sold on the auction block,—and never heard of again.
Birney took part in the work of the new anti-slavery societies, but he did not follow Garrison's no-government theories. He favored for a while the policy of throwing the anti-slavery strength for such congressional nominees of the regular parties as favored their views, and several candidates were chosen in this way. But when Clay became pronounced against the Abolitionists, and even John Quincy Adams, after championing the right of petition, voted against the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, Birney and his sympathizers gave up hope of help from existing parties, and organized their own party for the election of 1840. Its principles were resistance to slavery extension, and opposition to slavery so far as was practicable under the Constitution,—the principles later of the Republican party. Birney was nominated for President, and this handful of voters was the seed of the harvest twenty years later. He was again the candidate in 1844, with an increased support, and the party now was named "The Liberty Party."
A leader and type of the moderate anti-slavery sentiment was William Ellery Channing. In Channing was a blending of high moral ideals, intelligent views of human nature and society, an apostle's earnestness wedded with "sweet reasonableness," and a personal character of rare symmetry and beauty. He was an evolutionist and not a revolutionist. Foremost among the group of New England ministers who broadened and ripened out of the orthodoxy of their day, and were ostracized by their former brethren, he was forced into the position of leader of a new sect, but his utterances and spirit were always those of a minister of the church universal. He was the early advocate of mostof the religious and social reforms which have since come to the front. By preference, he always used the methods of peace and persuasion. He had made early acquaintance with slavery in a two-years' residence in Richmond while a young man. He was always opposed to it, but his attention was long absorbed by the immediate needs of his own people. He spent half a year in Santa Cruz, for his health, in 1830-1,—just when Garrison was starting theLiberator,—and slavery came home to him with new force. The plantation on which he lived was one of the best in the West Indies. The proprietor had taken a pride in the character and condition of his slaves. But he had fallen into bankruptcy, his estate had been sold, and the new proprietor left it in charge of an overseer who was a passionate and licentious man, under whom the slaves suffered a very different treatment. Most pathetic incidents came under Dr. Channing's notice. But from all he saw about him he concluded that the physical sufferings of the slaves had been exaggerated by report; that, with occasional cruelties, they were better off as to physical comfort than most of the European peasantry. He writes to an English correspondent, "I suspect that a gang of negroes receive fewer stripes than a company of soldiers of the same number in your army"; that they are under a less iron discipline and suffer incomparably less than soldiers in a campaign. But he adds, and always insists, that their condition degrades them intellectually and morally, lowers them toward the brutes, and in this respect the misery of slavery cannot be expressed too strongly. Marriage is almost unknown; family life, with its mutual dependence and the resulting tenderness, scarcely exists; and thus "the poor negro is excluded from Nature's primary school for the affections and the whole character." "The like causes are fatal to energy, foresight, self-control."
The inspiration of Channing's creed, the soul of the new movement in religion, was the potential nobility of human nature—a nobility to be made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to write his treatise upon it.
Returning to Boston, he spoke with clearness and weight to his congregation: "I think no power of conception can do justice to the evils of slavery. They are chiefly moral, they act on the mind, and through the mind bring intense suffering to the body. As far as the human soul can be destroyed, slavery is that destroyer." Having borne his testimony, he devoted himself to the general work of his ministry. The violence of the men who had come to the front in Abolitionism was not only against his taste and feeling, but against his deep convictions; as he had written years before to Webster, he saw in these denunciations of the slave-holder seeds of a harvest of sectional hate and national disaster.
A characteristic conversation with him is recorded by Rev. Samuel J. May, himself in full alliance with the Abolitionists, but a man of great sweetness and sanity, never diverted from his religious ministry or losing his mental balance. Dr. Channing dwelt on the excesses of the Abolitionists until Mr. May was aroused, and broke out: "Dr. Channing, I am tired of these complaints! The cause of suffering humanity, the cause of our oppressed, crushed, colored countrymen, has called as loudly upon others as upon us, who are known as the Abolitionists. But the others have done nothing. The wise and prudent saw the wrong, but did nothing to remove it. The priest and Levite passed by on the other side; the children of Abraham held their peace, until 'the very stones have cried out' against thistremendous wickedness. The people who have taken up the cause may lack the calmness and discretion of scholars, clergy, and statesmen,—but the scholars, clergy, and statesmen, have done nothing. We Abolitionists are just what we are,—babes and sucklings, obscure men, silly women, publicans, sinners; and we shall manage the matter we have taken in hand just as might be expected of such persons as we are. It is unbecoming in able men, who stood by and would do nothing, to complain of us because we manage this matter no better."
And so the torrent of words dashed upon the silent listener, until the speaker suddenly bethought himself and stopped in abashment,—this man he was rebuking had been to him as a father in God, his kind friend from childhood, and first among the great and good. Almost overwhelmed by his own temerity, he watched the agitated face of his hearer and waited in painful suspense for the reply. At last, in a very subdued manner and in his kindest tones of voice, he said, "Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof; I have been silent too long."
May's appeal had only quickened a little the sure work of Channing's conscience. A few months later, in December, 1835, he published his short treatise onSlavery. No weightier word on the subject was ever spoken. If mankind were moved by their higher reason the North would not have waited twenty years to be converted to anti-slavery byUncle Tom's Cabin. And if the South had been wise in her day, she would have listened to this noble and persuasive utterance. No passion sullied its temper; slave and slave-holder were held in equal regard; the case was pleaded on irresistible grounds—of facts beyond question and rooted in the very constitution of human nature. The needed, the righteous, the inevitable reform, was shown as part of the upward movement of humanity, and as appealing toevery consideration of practical wisdom and of justice. The little book of 150 pages deserves to be held as a classic in American history.
Channing never lost the sense of proportion in his own work. He went on giving inspiration and leadership to religious thought and to social advance. It was neither necessary nor possible for him to be in close sympathy or habitual alliance with the extreme Abolitionists. But he vindicated the right of free speech when it was denied them, and he was recognized by the best of their number as a friend of the cause. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child,—like Mr. May, one of the finest spirits among the Abolitionists—wrote: "He constantly grew upon my respect, until I came to regard him as the wisest as well as the gentlest apostle of humanity. I owe him thanks for preserving me from the one-sidedness to which zealous reformers are so apt to run. He never sought to undervalue the importance of anti-slavery, but he said many things to prevent me from looking upon it as the only question interesting to humanity."
Side by side with the anti-slavery sentiment was growing another sentiment—distinct from it, at first often in practical hostility to it, but at last blending with it for a common triumph. It was the sentiment of American nationality—the love of the Union. The separate colonies were brought together in the Revolution by a common peril and a common struggle. Then their tendency to fall apart was counteracted by the strong bond of the Constitution and the Federal government. Diverse interests and mutual distrust still tended to draw them asunder. With the continuance of the Union, the strengthening of the tie by use, the hallowing of old associations under the glamour of memory, and the growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common country and destiny began to takeroot in the hearts of men, and on occasion disclosed itself with the strength and nobility of a heroic passion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The Federal Union—it must be preserved!" Clay found the noblest exercise of his eloquence and his diplomacy in evoking the national spirit and in harmonizing the differences which threatened it. But the most stirring voice and effective leadership was that of Daniel Webster.
As Webster is judged in the retrospect, we see that he was not so much a statesman, still less a moral idealist, as an advocate. His lucidity of statement and emotional power were not matched by constructive ability. His name is associated with no great measure of administration, no large and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he was the representative and exponent of established interests,—not the projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast accumulated experience and tradition of mankind; it has been slowly wrought out, as a regulation and adjustment of existing interests; with an effort toward equity, as understood by the best intelligence of each period, but always with immense regard for precedent and previous usage. It was in this spirit, highly conservative of what has already been secured, and extremely cautious toward radical change, that Webster habitually dealt with political institutions. It was characteristic of him that in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820 he pleaded strongly for the retention of the property qualification ofvoters for State senators. But when the tide moved irresistibly toward manhood suffrage, he acquiesced.
But conservative as he was by nature, he was in profound sympathy with a sentiment which while rooted in the past was yet in the '20s and '30s a young, plastic, growing idea,—the idea of American Union, indissoluble, perpetual. No voice was so powerful as Webster's to fill the minds and hearts of man with this lofty passion. His orations at Plymouth Rock, at Bunker Hill, and upon the simultaneous deaths of Adams and Jefferson, his vindication of the national idea against the localism of Hayne and Calhoun,—were organ-voices of patriotism. They thrilled the souls of those who listened; they went over the country and printed themselves on the minds of men; school-boys declaimed passages from them; they became part of the gospel of the American people.
We may quote a single passage from the address inspired by that dramatic circumstance, the death at once of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with America and in America a new era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of. America, America, our country, fellow-countrymen, our own dear and native land, is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have maintained them.... If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, heaven will assist us to carry on the work ofhuman liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our paths. Washington is in the upper sky. These other stars have now joined the American constellation; they circle round their center, and the heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination let us walk the course of life, and at its close devoutly commend our beloved country, the common parent of us all, to the Divine Benignity."
Two master passions strove for leadership in the mind and heart of America. One was love of the united nation and ardor to maintain its union. The other was the aspiration to purify the nation, by removing the wrong of slavery. Unionist and Abolitionist stood face to face. After many years they were to stand shoulder to shoulder, in a common cause. In a larger sense than he gave the words, Webster's utterance became the final watchword: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."
In the retrospect of history, our attention naturally fastens on the conspicuous and heroic figures. But we must not forget the underlying and often determining forces,—the interests, beliefs, and passions, of the mass of the community. And, while listening intently to the articulate voices, the impressive utterances, we are to remember that the life of the community as of the individual is shaped oftenest by the inarticulate, unavowed, half-unconscious sentiments:
Below the surface stream, shallow and light,Of what we say we feel,—below the stream,As light, of what we think we feel, there flowsWith noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,The central stream of what we feel indeed.
The underlying human force in the slavery question was the primitive instinct in man to keep all he has got; the instinct of the man who lives at another's expense to keepon doing so. That underlay all the fine theories about differences of race, all the theological deductions from Noah's curse upon Canaan. Another great and constant factor was the absorption of men and communities, not personally concerned in a social wrong, in pursuits and interests of their own which shut out all outlook beyond. In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place. There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern manufacturer; there was the prejudice of color and race; and all these influences, open or latent, told powerfully for keeping slavery as it was.
The great default, the fatal failure, was the omission of the Southern whites, especially their leaders by education and by popular recognition, to take deliberate and systematic measures for the removal of slavery. Difficult? Yes, very. Impossible? Why, almost every other country of North and South America,—including the Spanish-Americans on whom the English-Americans look down with such superiority,—these all got rid of slavery without violence or revolution. Whatever the case required,—of preparation, compensation, new industrial arrangement,—the Southern whites had the whole business in their hands, to deal with as they pleased. Whatever cries might be raised by a few for instant and unconditional emancipation, there never was a day when the vast mass of the American people, of all sections, were not avowedly and unmistakably committed to letting the Southern States treat slavery as their own matter, and deal with it as they pleased, provided only they kept it at home. Excuses for non-action there were, ofcourse,—the perplexities of the situation, the irritation of criticism from without,—but Nature has no use for excuses. If there is a cancer in the system it is useless to plead the expense of the surgery or the pain of the knife. The alternative is simple—removal or death.
It is always impossible to distinguish closely in the causes of events between the action of human will and the wider forces which we call Nature or Providence. But in some eras we distinguish more clearly than in others the effect of human personalities. For example, in the making of the Constitution we see a difficult situation taken wisely and resolutely in hand by a group of strong men; they made themselves a part of Fate. But in the fluctuating history of slavery, with its final catastrophe, we seem to be looking at elemental movements; masses of men drifting under impulses, with no leadership adequate to the occasion. The men who seemingly might have mastered the situation, and brought it to a peaceful and right solution, either could not or would not do it.
What happened was, that two opposite social systems, existing within the same political body, came into rivalry, into hostility, and at last into direct conflict. In the early stages, slavery had on its side the advantage of an established place under the law, the support of its local communities becoming more and more determined, the long-time indifference and inertia of the free States, custom, conservatism, timidity, race prejudice. But against all this were operating steadily two tremendous forces. In the race for industrial advantage which is at last the decisive test, free society was superior to slave society by as much as the freeman is superior to the slave. The advantage of the Northern farmer or mechanic over the negro slave was the measure of the advantage of the North over the South. In increase of wealth; in variety, intensity, and productivenessof social life; in immigration; in intellectual progress, the free States outstripped the slave States by leaps and bounds. And, again, in the conscience of humanity,—in mankind's sense of right and wrong, which grows ever a more potent factor in the world's affairs,—the tide was setting steadily and swiftly against slavery. To impatient reformers who, as Horace Mann said, were always in a hurry, while God never is,—the tide might seem motionless or refluent, as to him who looks hastily from the ocean shore; but as the sea follows the moon, the hearts of men were following the new risen luminary of humanity's God-given rights.
And so, under each special phase of the conflict, slavery had against it that dominant force which acts on one side in the material progress of society, and on the other side in the human conscience; that force—"some call it Evolution, and others call it God."
We have seen that about 1832-3 a new distinctness and prominence was given to the slavery question by various events,—the substantial victory of the South Carolina nullifiers, and the leadership thenceforth of the South by Calhoun; Nat Turner's rising, and the rejection by Virginia of the emancipation policy; the compensated liberation of the West India slaves by the British Government; and the birth of aggressive Abolitionism under the lead of Garrison. We have now to glance at the main course of history for the next twenty years. Party politics had for a time no direct relation to slavery. The new organizations of Whigs and Democrats disputed on questions of a national bank, internal improvements, and the tariff. The Presidency was easily won in 1836 by Jackson's lieutenant, Van Buren; but the commercial crash of 1837 produced a revulsion of feeling which enabled the Whigs to elect Benjamin Harrison in 1840. His early death gave the Presidency to John Tyler of Virginia, who soon alienated his party, and who was thoroughly Southern in his sympathies and policy.
The newly aroused anti-slavery enthusiasm in the North found expression in petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It was not intrinsically a great matter, but it was the one point where the national authority seemed clearly to have a chance to act—questions of new territory being for the time in abeyance. Petitions poured in on Congress with thousands of signatures—then with tens, then hundreds of thousands. There was a hotstruggle as to whether the petitions should be received at all by the Senate and House. John Quincy Adams, willing after his Presidency to serve in the humbler capacity of congressman, was the champion of the right of petition. Calhoun had entered the Senate in 1832 and remained there with a brief intermission until his death in 1850. He stood independent of the two great parties, with his own State always solidly behind him, and with growing influence over the whole South. He was the leader in opposing the admission of the petitions. He maintained that any discussion in Congress of such a topic was injurious and incendiary; he voiced the new sentiment of the South that all agitation of slavery was an invasion of its rights. "Hands off!" was the cry. The question was settled in 1836, after long debates, by another compromise, proposed by James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; the petitions were given a formal reception, but instantly rejected without debate.
Another burning question was the circulation of anti-slavery documents through the Southern mails. In 1835 a mob in Charleston broke open the post-office, and made a bonfire of all such matter they could find. The social leaders and the clergy of the city applauded. The postmaster-general under Jackson, Amos Kendall, wrote to the local postmaster who had connived at the act: "I cannot sanction and will not condemn the step you have taken." Jackson asked Congress to pass a law excluding anti-slavery literature from the mails. Even this was not enough for Calhoun; he claimed that every State had a right to pass such legislation for itself, with paramount authority over any act of Congress. But the South would not support him in this claim; and indeed he was habitually in advance of his section, which followed him generally at an interval of a few years. Congress refused to pass any law on the subject. But the end was reached without law; Southernpostmasters systematically refused to transmit anti-slavery documents—even of so moderate character as the New YorkTribune—and this was their practice until the Civil War. "A gross infraction of law and right!" said the North. "But," said the South, "would you allow papers to circulate in your postoffices tending directly to breed revolt and civil war? If the mails cannot be used in the service of gambling and lotteries, with far more reason may we shut out incitements to insurrection like Nat Turner's."
On a similar plea all freedom of speech in Southern communities on the question of slavery was practically denied. Anti-slavery men were driven from their homes. In Kentucky, one man stood out defiantly and successfully. Cassius M. Clay opposed slavery, advocated its compensated abolition, and was as ready to defend himself with pistols as with arguments. He stood his ground to the end, and in 1853 he settled Rev. John G. Fee at Berea, who established a group of anti-slavery churches and schools, which was broken up after John Brown's raid, but after the war was revived as Berea College. But as a rule free speech in the South was at an end before 1840. No man dared use language like that of Patrick Henry and Madison; and Jefferson'sNotes on Virginia, if newly published, would have been excluded from the mails and its author exiled.
South Carolina passed a law under which negro seamen on ships entering her ports were put in jail while their vessel remained, and if the jail fees were not paid, they were sold into slavery. When Massachusetts seamen suffered under this law, the State government in 1844 dispatched an eminent citizen, Samuel Hoar, to try to secure a modification of the enactment. Arriving in Charleston, accompanied by his daughter, Mr. Hoar was promptly visited in his hotel by a committee of prominent men and obliged to leave the city and State at once.
The North had its share of violence. In Connecticut a school for negro children, kept by two white women, was forcibly broken up. In Illinois in 1837 an anti-slavery newspaper office was destroyed by a mob, and its proprietor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered.
In the Presidential election of 1840 slavery was almost forgotten. The Whigs were bent on overthrowing the Democratic administration, to which they attributed the hard times following 1837; and they raised a popular hurrah for the candidate of the "plain people," William Henry Harrison of Indiana, who had won a victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe. In a canvass where "log-cabins" and "hard cider" gave the watchwords and emblems, national politics played little part. But now first those resolute anti-slavery men who were determined to bring their cause before the people as a political issue, and fight it out in that arena, with solid ranks be their forces ever so small,—came together and nominated for the Presidency James G. Birney. They could give him but a handful of votes, but it was the raising of a flag which twenty years was to carry to victory. Birney, never an extremist, had grown to a full recognition of all that was at stake. He wrote in 1835: "The contest is becoming—has become—not one alone of freedom for the blacks, but of freedom for the whites.... There will be no cessation of the strife until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty destroyed."
For a dozen years there had been only skirmishing. Now came on a battle royal, or rather a campaign, from 1844 to 1850,—the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, and the last great compromise. Texas, a province of Mexico after Mexico became free from Spain, received a steady immigration from the American Southwestern States. These immigrants became restive under Mexican control, declared their independence in 1835, and practically secured it aftersharp fighting. Slavery, abolished under Mexico, was re-established by the republic of Texas. From the character of its population, it seemed to gravitate toward the United States. The keen eyes of the Southern leaders were early fixed upon it. Annex Texas, and a great field of expansion for slavery was open. Its votes in the Senate and House would be added to the Southern column, and from its immense domain future States might be carved. As early as 1829 Lundy's and Garrison'sGeniushad protested against this scheme. The time was now ripe for carrying it out. Calhoun was again the leader. He claimed to be "the author of annexation," and with good reason. He exchanged the Senate for Tyler's cabinet as Secretary of War in 1844, the change being engineered by Henry A. Wise, one of the rising men in Virginia,—for the express purpose of bringing in Texas. A treaty of annexation was negotiated with Texas, and sent to the Senate. There were difficulties; the Texans had cooled in their zeal for annexation; and the American Senate was not over-favorable. To give the necessary impetus, Calhoun,—so says Van Holst, in his excellent and not unfriendly biography,—fell below his habitual sincerity, and misrepresented a dispatch of the English Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, as showing a disposition on England's part to get hold of Texas for herself. It was a Presidential year; the Democratic convention nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee, and passed a resolution favoring annexation. But Calhoun had now shown his motive so plainly that the country took alarm, and the Senate rejected the treaty. The Whigs nominated Clay. He was believed to be opposed to the annexation scheme, but his hunger for the great prize betrayed him into an equivocal expression, which lost him the confidence of the strong anti-slavery men. Again they nominated Birney,—taking now the name of the Liberty party—and gavehim so many votes that the result was to lose New York and Michigan for Clay, and Polk was elected. The administration now claimed—though in truth the combined Whig and Liberty vote put it in a minority—that it had received a plebiscite of popular support on its annexation policy. Thus emboldened, its friends,—knowing that they could not yet count on the two-thirds vote necessary for a senatorial confirmation,—dropped the treaty altogether, and brought into Congress a joint resolution affirming the annexation of Texas to the Union. This won the necessary majority in both houses, and as the last act of Tyler's administration Texas was declared a State.
Calhoun now returned to the Senate,—his temporary substitute promptly vacating at his word. Thus far he had triumphed. But his associates in their elation were eager for another conquest. Texas is ours, now let us have California and the Pacific! But to that end, Mexico, reluctant to yield Texas, and wholly unwilling to cede more territory, must be attacked and despoiled. At that proposal Calhoun drew back. It does not appear that he had any scruples about Mexico. But, keener-sighted than his followers, he knew that any further acquisitions to the West would be stoutly and hopefully claimed by the North. His warning was in vain; he had lighted a fire and now could not check it. The next step was to force Mexico into a war. She claimed the river Nueces as her boundary with Texas, while Texas claimed the Rio Grande. Instructions were quietly given to General Taylor, in January, 1846, to throw his small force into the disputed territory, so near the Rio Grande as to invite a Mexican attack. The Mexican force did attack him, and President Polk instantly declared that "war existed by the act of Mexico"—thus allowing Congress no chance to pass on it. As is the way of nations, fighting once begun, every consideration of justice was ignored and the only word was "our country, right or wrong." Congressmen of both parties voted whatever supplies were needed for the war; and the Whigs, trying to throw the blame on the President, put no obstacles in the way of his conquest of Mexico. Only one man in Congress spoke out for justice as higher than party or country. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, in a powerful speech, denounced the whole iniquitous business, and declared that were he a Mexican facing the American invaders of his home, "I would welcome them with hospitable hands to bloody graves!"
The war called out another voice that went home to the heart of the people,—the voice of James Russell Lowell in the "Biglow Papers." In the homely Yankee vernacular he spoke for the highest conscience of New England. The righteous wrath was winged with stinging wit and lightened with broad humor. He spoke for that sentiment of the new and nobler America which abhorred slavery and detested war, and saw in a war for the extension of slavery a crime against God and man. The politician's sophistries, the respectable conventionalities current in church and state, found no mercy at his hands:
Ez fer war, I call it murder,—There you hev it plain and flat:I don't want to go no furderThan my Testyment fer that:God hez sed so plump an' fairly,It's ez long ez it is broad,An' you've got to git up airlyEf you want to take in God.'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathersMake the thing a grain more right;'Tain't a follerin' your bell-wethersWill excuse ye in his sight;Ef you take a sword and draw it,An' go stick a feller thru,Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,God'll send the bill to you.Massachusetts, God forgive her,She's a kneelin' with the rest,She, that ought to hav' clung foreverIn her grand old eagle-nest.